TikTok Loosens Grip on Political Speech for Black Lives Matter

Photographer: Olivier Douliery/AFP via Getty Images

In a massively popular clip on the video-sharing app TikTok, police snipers atop a Minneapolis police station point their guns at Black Lives Matter protesters. Demonstrators fight tear gas, sirens blare and helicopters fly overhead. The footage is set to  “This is America,” Donald Glover’s anthem about race and gun violence.

The video became one of the top clips on TikTok’s #BlackLivesMatter hashtag, and drew more than 43 million views. Its popularity shocked the video’s creator, a 33-year-old comedian named Kareem Rahma. “I’m not an activist,” Rahma said. “I joined TikTok to make funny videos, but when my hometown of Minneapolis turned into a war zone I needed to show people.”

The grim 30-second clip, shot last month during protests over the death of George Floyd, is a far cry from the goofy memes, upbeat lip-syncing and bedroom twerking clips that turned TikTok, owned by ByteDance Ltd., into a global sensation over the last few years. The app has been downloaded over 2 billion times globally according to research firm Sensor Tower. Its success is largely the result of its positioning as a fun, playful corner of the internet devoid of the controversies plaguing sites like Twitter Inc., Facebook Inc. and Reddit Inc.

TikTok’s decision to chart a different course was deliberate. Many American tech companies have preached a flavor of free speech absolutism since their founding, compromising only as difficult content moderation questions became public relations disasters. TikTok is different. It has regularly made a practice of removing posts that didn’t fit its carefully crafted carefree image, or reducing their views even if it did leave them up.

Some of the company’s early guidance on content moderation limited the reach of posts from overweight, queer or disabled users, according to documents obtained by The Guardian. Another early rule banned “highly controversial topics,” such as separatism or ethnic conflict. TikTok has said it has discontinued these practices.

TikTok has faced persistent allegations that its decisions on content align with priorities of the Chinese government. It has targeted videos related to pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, the mistreatment of Muslims in China’s Xinjiang region, and standoffs at the India-China border. Last year, a Bytedance spokesman told Bloomberg that TikTok didn’t remove videos from the Hong Kong protests for political reasons, saying they may have instead been taken down for violating guidelines around violent, graphic, shocking or sensational content.

That no longer seems to be as much of a consideration. The platform has erupted with images of nationwide protests, featuring videos that show tear gas, police with guns, racist material, and expletive-laced songs denouncing President Trump. Videos with the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag have surpassed 10 billion views. “For some people, their entire feeds are transformed with Black Lives Matter content on TikTok,” said Daniel Sinclair, an independent researcher who studies TikTok and social media. “It’s no different than Twitter.”

Sinclair notes that Chinese officials, state media and social media sites like Douyin, Bytedance’s Chinese version of TikTok, have all been amplifying the violent protests and heated discussions about race unfolding across America. But whether China’s moves to project an image of U.S. instability play into the decision-making at TikTok is hard to decipher, according to Sinclair. 

Last October, U.S. Senators Tom Cotton and Chuck Schumer requested a government review of TikTok over national security concerns. One of the issues they cited was the app’s potential to host foreign influence campaigns, and its alleged censorship of topics deemed politically sensitive to the Chinese Communist Party. That same month TikTok banned all political, advocacy, and issue ads from its platform, claiming such ads would undermine TikTok’s “positive environment” according to a company blog post. TikTok has said the Chinese government has not asked the app to remove any posts.

As with other social media sites, TikTok faces questions about whether it is enforcing its own policies consistently. “As I see it, a lot of the popular Black Lives Matter posts actually do go against TikTok’s own stated community guidelines,” said Joseph Seering, a doctoral candidate at Carnegie Mellon University who studies content moderation. He points to prohibitions on things like hate speech and firearms. “My guess would be that TikTok has come to realize that removing some of those videos and records of the protests would just do more harm to the platform than it’s worth,” Seering said. 

TikTok said that it released updated community guidelines in January that provide exceptions for videos that are educational, historical, newsworthy, or otherwise aim to raise awareness about issues. The new guidelines also allow for exemptions on displays of firearms for those carried by a police officer.

“While much of the content our users create is light-hearted, more serious content also has a place on our platform,” said a company spokeswoman. She added that TikTok has increased the size of its local safety teams and consulted with outside experts about how to handle sensitive content issues. The site recently left up some posts related to Black Lives Matter that might have violated its previous guidelines, she said, “because its relevance and timeliness to our Black community was evident and made it newsworthy for our users.”